The adoption of packet transport technology is flexible enough for many applications. Some of those applications have strong requirement on end-to-end, E2E, delay, so they use a transport level packet per each information unit. Other applications have less restrictive E2E delay requirement, so they may use a transport level packet for transporting as many information units as possible. The technology that allows gathering many information units on the same transport level packet (toward the same destination) is known as “bundling” and permits a better usage of transport network and processing resources. It is well known that, under specific traffic and incoming bandwidth profile, bounding could significantly reduce resource usage, causing a better utilisation ratio of the Transport Layer.
Unluckily, bundling requires or causes a fixed delay in transporting the information units, time needed by the bundling itself to decide when to round-up the received information units and send them in the same transport level packet. This delay is unwanted, especially with a low incoming bandwidth rate when the delay may become quite intrusive.
Bundling is based on timing and size, meaning that on each request for sending a packet from an upper level protocol, e.g. an application, the transport level protocol will start time supervision. Further requests from upper level protocol will be gathered within the same transport level packet until the timer supervision expires, or the transport level packet is full, in both cases the packet will be sent.